Circumvented browser features to force autoplay on videos with high volume on our websites. While not a morally bankrupt thing to do especially compared to some of the other examples, we all felt dirty doing it.
That just sends me stampeding for the [X] on the tab button all the faster.
Could you explain this position? (Honestly asking.)
It's sure not great if you want people to come back to your site, but it's not morally bankrupt.
That's where you're wrong, kiddo. There's laws now.
Circumvented browser features to force autoplay on videos with high volume on our websites. While not a morally bankrupt thing to do especially compared to some of the other examples, we all felt dirty doing it.
There's no information about the size of the company there. I replied to a comment that said there are no relevant laws and suggested that that person check out the ADA. The ADA might be relevant.
Either way, it doesn't exist any more and if you were ever bothered by it (I apologize), there are no over-arching effects that you have to worry about.
Metricitisis is a major management disease of our times and neither corporate, nor government nor nonprofits are safe from missing the point completely in the quest for meeting irrelevant metrics so they can say they are a good manager.
I worked once for a small company that had a social media marketing side (separate from what I did for them, but we sat in the same open space). From what I've observed, the social media marketing business mostly boiled down to our people writing reports which shown nicely growing metrics to customers who then happily paid. The metrics might or might not have been correlated with any real-world increase in profits, and really neither side understood any of that. But it looked believable, so customers paid.
I suspect a lot of that is happening in adtech these days - people with no understanding of statistics bullshitting each other with pretty charts.